Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt

Author:Michael Schmidt [Schmidt, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-55752-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1998-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Something must be wrong with a style that can aestheticize and morally neutralize such a scene.

Six months, and I sit still and hold

In two cold palms her two cold feet.

Her hair, half grey half rusted gold,

Thrills me and burns me in kissing it.

Where tension exists, it is between simple polarities: pain and pleasure, life and death, love and death, love and time, youth and time. The enactment of such conflicts can hardly be called a poetry of ideas. It is a poetry of moods. Synesthesia, or the mixing of senses—audible sights, visible sounds and so on—is part of a reductive process, owing a superficial debt to the profound art of Baudelaire. Fingers, lips, the “pores of sense,” do the work eyes do in other verses. In a sense we ingest Swinburne, rather as the sea, a favorite image of his, ingests (as it were maternally) the swimmer and the shipwreck.

He raises fundamental questions about poetic language. How far can schemes of rhythm be usefully carried? What is the effect of sound patterning when intellectual control is in abeyance? What value has a poetry without ideas, with no specific content beyond mood and feeling—even when the subjects are ostensibly intellectual, like “liberty,” and the content almost perceptible? Can poetry hope in any valid sense to approach the condition of music in the terms of music? Was Swinburne struggling (like Arnold and Hopkins) at the end of an exhausted tradition, seeking in technical facility an energy not naturally his? The choruses from Atalanta and poems such as “Tristram of Lyonesse,” “Dolores,” “A Forsaken Garden,” “The Triumph of Time,” “Laus Veneris” and “A Nympholept” raise these—and the moral—questions. They do not answer them. Perhaps the power of the choruses from Atalanta is that they have a context and touch a specific theme at a specific season:

… winter’s rains and ruins are over

And all the season of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the light that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.